Social media has evolved at an incredible pace. New social networking sites are introduced regularly, algorithms change, audiences mature and every brand on earth is searching for the next piece of viral content.

Social media advertising has allowed marketers to ‘fake it ‘till you make it.’ You can pay a couple of bucks and you’ll get more likes, follows and video views and, on the surface, it will appear as though you’re winning. But it’s all in vain.

So often we hear companies defining success in social media as the amount of followers they have or bemoaning that their competitors are doing a better job on social because of the size of their Facebook audience.

We need to stop this.

A winning social media strategy is one that aims to amplify your victory metrics, not your vanity ones. So if you want to reap the benefits of social media for your business, these are the four pillars that Avinash Kaushik recommends should be supporting your digital strategy.

Conversation Rate

The conversation rate measures how much conversation your content is generating on its respective social network. Measuring this requires you to listen to your audience and pay attention to the content driving conversation. Your conversation rate can be measured across all social media sites; it’s simply the number of comments you receive on a post on Facebook, comments on a photo on Instagram, replies to your blog and responses to tweets. Easy.

Online communities are built on conversation. It gives you the opportunity to understand your audience by participating in the conversation and in return increasing a metric which matters.

The math is simple: the fewer comments you receive, the less your content is engaging and connecting with your audience.

You can measure conversation per post, but for the purpose of monthly reporting you can:Total number of comments / total number of posts = Average monthly conversation rate. Our recommendation is to provide the average as well as the top three performing pieces of content for the month.

Amplification Rate

Whether you have 300,000 or three followers, you have a social network. What’s even better is that each of those followers also has a social network of their own that you can access. If you provide engaging content, your audience will want to share, retweet, repost or regram it. This is amplification.

If your business can amplify your content, you’re not only reaching potentially thousands more people, but you can rest assured that you’re providing your audience with content of value, content they believe they need to share with their network. All of a sudden, your likes and follows are growing; not because you’re paying for them, but because your audience sees your value. That is a relationship no social media marketing dollar can buy.

To measure amplification:

FacebookNumber of shares per post.

TwitterNumber of retweets per tweet.

YouTubeNumber of video shares.

BlogNumber of blog shares.

InstagramNumber of regram / mentions.

Applause Rate

Applause rate helps us understand how our audience feels about our content. Is your Instagram photo visually appealing enough to encourage your audience to double tap the screen? Do people relate to your tweet enough to be persuaded to tap that little love heart? Measure it.

What has given the applause rate metric more depth recently is the introduction of Facebook Reactions. These reactions allows Facebook users to express laughter, amazement, sadness or anger at content, while the old-school ‘like’ has been paired up with a ‘love.’ We can now actually report on exactly how our content makes our audience feel.

To measure applause rate:

FacebookOn a graph, represent the number and type of reactions

TwitterNumber of favourites on tweets

YouTubeNumber of likes on videos

BlogNumber of likes on blogs

InstagramNumber of likes on photos

Economic Value

Economic value of social media is what every business wants to see. Whether you’re operating an ecommerce site or a blog, you can measure the value of referrals to your website from social networks.

Google analytics allows you to view the amount of revenue generated from any social media site and this is the data that will keep your boss happy. The ultimate goal of any marketing activity is to generate more leads and convert them to sales. Google analytics can easily measure that. If you’re not running an ecommerce site, google analytics will allow you to set macro and micro goals, which can be referred directly from your social media networks. These will provide an economic value per click that you can then report directly on.

A macro goal is the end product that you want the referral to complete, whether this is a sale or a sign up for a webinar. A micro level goal is everything in between: researching the product, reading about the company or signing up for a newsletter. Everything is trackable and everything has an economic value.

So there you have it, the four victory metrics that will always be honest about your content.

Let’s remember what social media is: it’s ‘social’ media. It’s there for businesses to build a community and engage with their customers and this is what we, as marketers, should be focused on growing. Stop being vain with your metrics; likes, followers and subscribers don’t matter anymore. It’s not the community with the most people that wins, it’s the community with the most meaningful voice.

Ok, so for the purposes of business development, that title is a bit heavy-handed. I don’t mean you need to be a womanising, hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, card shark British spy who saves the world wearing a tuxedo. Unless you want to be.

But I will insist that you need to be a bit like Bond and channel his inner man-child. Consider this.

James Bond’s longevity as a character and franchise is due to one overriding factor: he is the puer aeternus.

A Jungian archetype, the puer aeternus is a forever young child-god who ages and gains experience, but retains the emotional immaturity of an adolescent. They are forever wandering, forever adventuring and forever unfulfilled.

Unlike most narratives or films that conclude in a romantic union, Bond’s are almost purely sexual, only for him to encounter the next ‘Bond woman’ in the next story (it’s perhaps no coincidence that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was critically and popularly derided and George Lazenby’s first and last Bond role: it is the only film where Bond gets married).

From a franchise perspective, each Bond film also needs a new villain. A monster to be overthrown, a societal evil to overcome. These the filmmakers reinvent to reflect the anxieties of the day, whether they are drugs, Soviets or cyber-terrorists.

The constant renewal of these aspects keeps Bond eternally questing and eternally young. And while emotional and psychological immaturity are being leveraged by the writers, actors, producers and filmmakers to perpetuate one of the greatest franchises of all time, they are not necessarily good for real life individuals like you and me.

Unless we leverage a different message.

Having continually renewed goals – villains to overcome – whether in life, sport or business, keeps individuals and teams motivated. The cycle of constant renewal is healthy for sustained, and sustainable, business development and personal maturation.

Think of the successive rings of growth that make a tree strong. Or the way a farmer will rotate crops between fields to allow soil to regenerate.

Think, too, of the AFL’s Hawthorn Hawks, who have just accomplished an incredible premiership threepeat. The top priority for their coaching staff over the off-season will no doubt be how to frame season 2016 in a way that keeps players hungry and motivated.

Specifying those goals will make them easier to understand and approach, just as Bond knowing his opponents’s weaknesses makes that enemy easier to overcome. Remember that Bond spends most of each film learning about his enemy, parrying blows and riposting. Knowing what it takes to achieve your goal means knowing it intimately.

So set goals, re-set goals, set series of goals. Whether it’s having a website up and running by a specific date, training for a half-marathon or eating three meat-free dinners per week, it’s easier and more efficient to have specific, focused goals rather than broader ones. Easier to train for a 2km trial than simply ‘to get fit.’ Easier in business development to focus on making $200,000 revenue in your second year than to ‘be successful.’ Easier for Bond to battle a single steel-jawed terrorist than wage an entire war against terror.

Be unfulfilled like Bond. Be eternally questing. After achieving one goal, just like James Bond you can return to achieve another.

Arm yourself with an exploding pen and a helicopter in a suitcase, and hopefully there’ll be many more films in your franchise.

“…we shall, um, fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall, like, fight in the hills; moving forward, we shall never surrender…”

Churchill didn’t say it quite like that, but you will certainly be familiar with the offending interjections in everyday communication. They are the junk food of language, the dead space in your bag of Cheese Supreme Doritos; nothing, really, but filler.

So why do we use filler in speech?

Unscripted speech is harder (and more terrifying) than writing. It relies on charisma, projection, body language, eye contact, tone, immediate delivery – not to mention quality content. While searching our minds for the right content to speak, let alone deliver in the right way, words or utterances such as ‘um’ or ‘ah’ let our listeners know we’re still with them.

The catch, of course, is that listeners who are familiar with the content might perceive this as a lack of familiarity with the content on your behalf, never mind a lack of confidence in delivery.

While there is nothing essentially wrong with umming and ahhing (and you might know the meaning of life, but you just get a little nervous in front of crowds), perception means a great deal in life and business.

‘Effective immediately, I expect you to implement high-level strategic thinking in lowering the toilet seat after use moving forward.’

Ok, it’s unlikely anyone would ever write that sentence (or is it?), but we have all experienced managers or fellow employees who seem to relish in this class of corporate verbosity.

While it’s easy to accept the above sentence as everyday, or even harmless, by taking a step back you will see it for what it is: an expression of insecurity and a lack of conviction in authority and intent behind words.

Consider the alternative.

‘After you use the toilet, put the seat down.’

Same meaning, fewer words, better delivery = more memorable.

In speech and in writing, the phrase ‘moving forward’ and other corporate-speak sneaks into communication like goon into Falls Festival. In larger organisations it can spread like osmosis (or, depending on your point of view, the plague) because its nature as a type of padding or qualifier for intent suits risk and litigation averse businesses, or anyone afraid to be proven wrong.

David Brent: the master of corporate speak.

Fillers and corporate speak impede the meaning behind our communication with hollow words. Overly verbose statements may even suggest to educated listeners the omission of truth and fact, and can even be connected to lying.

On an individual level, it pays to eliminate such language – particularly ‘moving forward’ – from your vernacular. There are three main reasons that this corporate trash belongs in the bin:

It betrays a lack of application. Unoriginal speech and writing is easy to perceive as lazy – and not unjustifiably so.

It betrays a lack of conviction. Laziness, especially from management, breeds contempt in employees and co-workers and diminishes any threat of bite behind bark.

At a more basic, syntactic level, there exists an inherent and absurd redundancy in the use of ‘moving forward.’ Let’s take our example of a request to put the toilet seat down.

You and a friend are fixing a toilet. You need the seat lowered. You don’t say, ‘Put the seat down moving forward,’ because the immediacy of the context doesn’t require any reference to future lowering of the seat.

You have been asked/commanded by a superior (or partner) to lower the seat after use – ‘After you use the toilet, put the seat down.’ The context of discussion positions an answer – or statement of intent of action – as applicable to all subsequent uses. ‘Ok, I’ll put the seat down,’ doesn’t require ‘moving forward’ to qualify it, nor does the original request to do so.

Moving forward and other types of corporate filler take the function of ‘um,’ ‘like’ and ‘ah’ and wraps them up nicely. However, this process distorts and conceals the intended meaning of what’s actually being delivered – sort of like receiving a pair of socks for Christmas in a gift box.

Simply by eliminating these boxed pairs of socks from your writing and speech, you can build trust, inspire confidence and develop a reputation as a straight, effective communicator. After all, the great orator Winston Churchill may be remembered for many things, both good and bad, but never as a corporate goon who said he’d take on the Nazis moving forward.